Thursday, May 05, 2005

THE MARRIAGE DEBATE

rings of power

I was remarking this morning that The Chronicle of Higher Education is an excellent publication - informative, well-written, and brings in a nice balance of voices, opinions and perspectives. If NPR was a weekly newspaper, it would very closely resemble the Chron.

In this week's issue, they have an essay by Stephanie Coontz, writing on "The New Fragility of Marriage". I've been very interested in current debates around marriage - especially given local politics here in San Francisco around gay marriage and the like. While I don't have personal issues with the concept of modern marriage (after all, I am jumping the broom with S in 9 days), I find it troubling how the marriage institution has become a cornerstone of new Christian Right fundamentalism. They've shown great ability to create paranoia around the idea that the "foundation" of marriage is crumbling - this is exactly what that quack Pat Robertson is trying to milk.

What Coontz tries to do is look at exactly how the institution of marriage has changed over time and in doing so, she inadvertently exposes why much of this current hand-wringing over marriage is more hysterical than historical. Some choice ideas that she offers:

"...people's sense of what "the marriage crisis" involves differs drastically from place to place. In the United States, policy makers worry about the large numbers of children born out of wedlock. In Germany and Japan, by contrast, many planners are more interested in increasing the total number of births, regardless of the form of the family in which the children will be raised. So while federal policy in the United States encourages abstinence-only sex-education classes, Japanese pundits lament the drop in business at Japan's rent-by-the-hour 'love hotels.'"

"From the moment of its inception, that revolutionary new marriage system already showed signs of the instability that was to plague it at the end of the 20th century. As soon as the idea that love should be the central reason for marriage was first raised, observers of the day warned that the same values that increased people's satisfaction with marriage as a relationship had an inherent tendency to undermine the stability of marriage as an institution."

"Marriage has become more joyful, loving, and satisfying for many couples than ever before in history. At the same time, it has become optional and more brittle. Those two strands of change cannot be disentangled."

"No sooner did the ideal of marrying for love triumph than its most enthusiastic supporters started demanding the right to divorce if love died... And when people started thinking that the quality of the relationship was more important than the economic functions of the institution, some men and women argued that the committed love of two unmarried individuals, including those of the same sex, deserved at least as much social respect as a formal marriage entered into for mercenary reasons."

"...the most effective support systems for married couples, like subsidized parental leaves, flexible work schedules, high-quality child care, and access to counseling when a relationship is troubled, would also make things easier for those people who are constructing relationships outside marriage. Conversely, any measures that significantly limited social support or freedom of choice for the unmarried would probably backfire on the quality of life for the married as well."

The simple moral here is that you can't roll the clock back. People who talk about the "institution of marriage" being threatened rarely have an idea of what institution they're talking about and as Coontz tries to point out, the very ability for our society to enjoy marriage in its current state was brought about by transformations that simultaneously create many options away from marriage. Can't have it one way or the other.

(Or, in other words, to all the Defense of Marriage twits out there, kindly STFU).